It's not often you come across a scientific paper which notes that the information it covers is like something "seen on the television series Monster Quest." And you rarely read a paper which concludes, "The data conclusively proves that the Sasquatch exist as an extant hominin and are a direct maternal descendant of modern humans." But today, we have such a paper—and there's nothing usual about it, including the journal where it appears.
Back in December, our own Nate Anderson drove me to the bottle with a flurry of questions about cryptozoology. One of the big motivators of Nate's interest in sasquatch was a report that a Texas group had sequenced the creature's genome. Not surprisingly, the team behind this startling research had some trouble publishing a paper describing their results.
By all appearances, they've solved that problem... by establishing a brand new journal, called De Novo (I'm not kidding; they apparently bought an existing journal and renamed it). The journal's site appears to be a mix of clip art and some basic HTML. Though it claims to be "open access," the site actually charges $30 to see the bigfoot paper (although their press person was kind enough to provide Ars with a free copy). Payment requires a Google Wallet account.
Currently, the sasquatch genome report is all you can see. It's the only paper in Volume 1, Issue 1 of De Novo.
The results of this analysis will have to be duplicated by other researchers, of course, before it "conclusively proves" anything. So, don't hold your breath. To read more, click here.